Swift's Angers

Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions. Though he regarded himself as 'English' and despised the Irish 'natives' over whom the English ruled, Swift became the hero of an Irish independence he would not have desired. In this magisterial account, Claude Rawson, widely considered the leading Swift scholar of our time, brings together recent work, as well as classic earlier discussions extensively revised, offering fresh insights into Swift's bleak view of human nature, his brilliant wit, and the indignations and self-divisions of his writings and political activism.

Reviews & endorsements

'Swift's Angers is deeply learned and provocative, wide-ranging in its references and rich in its readings. Rawson's Swift is a conflicted man … that many of us feel we already know, but one who has perhaps never before been so fully and poignantly rendered.' Ashley Marshall, Modern Philology

Customer reviews

Product details

• Date Published: September 2014
• format: Adobe eBook Reader
• isbn: 9781316121313

• contains: 7 b/w illus.
• availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.